The Duchess of Cambridge is to become a volunteer Scout leader. It'll suit her
down to the ground.

Last February there was an amusing storm in a teacup when a Scout troop in Buckinghamshire decided that the best way to learn orienteering skills was to don balaclavas, kidnap a teenager posing as Kate Middleton and launch a 12-mile trek to rescue her. Local councillors declared themselves “horrified”. Clarence House wisely declined to comment.

Fortunately, the Duchess of Cambridge doesn’t appear to hold any grudges. Yesterday it was announced that, in addition to acting as the patron of four charities, ranging from drug addiction to art, she will become a volunteer Scout leader.

At first glance, it seems an unusual choice. Isn’t the Duchess more at home in Reiss dresses than neckerchiefs and woggles, more used to karaoke birthday bashes in London nightclubs than songs around a muddy “dyb, dyb, dyb” campfire? Given that she was a Brownie as a child, shouldn’t she have joined up with the Girl Guides instead? Or perhaps she was unduly influenced by Baden Powell’s advice in Scouting for Boys – first published in 1908 and fourth in popularity only to the Bible, the Koran and Mao Tse-tung’s Little Red Book – that bees “form a model community, for they respect the Queen, and kill their unemployed”.

Look more seriously beyond the outdated stereotypes, however, and the Scout Association appears a perfect fit for the Duchess.

First, there’s no doubt that she’s allying herself with a popular, as well as an illustrious, institution. Some 26 of the first 29 astronauts were former Scouts. And although these days they’re more likely to send people to Croydon than to the Moon – Scouts were among the first to help with the tidy-up after the riots last summer – there is no sense that they’re trading on past glories. Scout membership has grown by 14 per cent in the past five years and they have a popular Chief Scout in the form of Bear Grylls, former SAS man, television survival star and all-round action hero.

Unfortunately, not everyone has as much energy as Grylls. Although more and more adults are signing up to help – the association points out that its 100,000 volunteers outnumber the combined workforces of the BBC (24,000) and McDonald’s (67,000) – the oldies cannot keep pace with the youngsters. Scouting requires a ratio of around one adult to six children. The result is a serious shortage of volunteers and 35,000 young people languishing on a waiting list.

“We’re making it easier to volunteer in a flexible way,” says Simon Carter, a spokesman for the Scout Association. “Any time that you can give, we’ll give you a role to fit around that time. That’s why the Duchess joining is so good.”

Current volunteers are delighted. “I really hope it will make a difference,” says Lizzie O’Hagan, a 26-year-old consultant who volunteers as a Scout leader, helping with communication courses three weekends a year, and with the Girl Guides in south-west London every week. “People don’t realise that you don’t have to do – say – every Thursday night.”

“It would make such a difference if people gave even one weekend a year,” says Caroline Ledger, a 32-year-old marketing manager from Surrey, who met her husband through the Scouts.

Ledger has also met a huge range of other interesting volunteers, from firemen to teachers to a “man working in IT on submarines”. O’Hagan, for her part, has encountered everyone from 18-year-old leaders studying for their A levels to “men aged 40 with three children wanting to give something back to the community”. All speak of the joy of working with young people.

It is a diverse mixture into which one imagines the multi-tasking wife of the future King would fit quite well. One of her husband’s first engagements, despite not being a Scout himself, was to open the World Jamboree in 2007. She’s known to enjoy outdoor pursuits, and it will give her something practical, private and fun to do with young people in Anglesey, apart from waiting for the Duke to return from search-and-rescue heroics in his chopper.

“We were told that she didn’t want just to turn up and open things,” says Carter. “She wanted to get involved. Much of what she ends up doing will be below the radar and away from the media.”

It is early days, says Carter, and a timetable hasn’t been worked out – volunteering will have to fit around the Duchess’s new charitable duties, as well as the task of keeping her brother-in-law away from her sister. Judging from personal experience, however, she will have a lot of fun. In 2007, I visited a couple of troops and had a hilarious time playing hockey with rolled-up newspapers, meeting a range of articulate youngsters and turning white with fear as they persuaded me to go abseiling in a park in Essex. I was thankful that the visit preceded the Scout sex education courses, which started last April, but I did see an impressive range of other badges, from musicianship to circus skills to astronautics.

Today’s Scouts appear fearless. Caroline McCann, 38, from the Peak District, part outdoors instructor part graphic designer, has taken troops all over the world on expeditions. While Caroline Ledger has found herself “doing all sorts of stuff I wouldn’t do normally: paragliding, zorbing [rolling down a hill attached to a plastic ball] and abseiling – madness.”

If the Duchess is after even more madness, she needn’t venture far from her Anglesey cottage. Last year Grylls started inviting select groups to a survival course on an island he owns off the coast of North Wales. “If you think abseiling is hard, you should try it while holding a dead rabbit,” says one female 18-year-old participant.

Scouts have been mixed since 2001. And although girls still represent only about 13 per cent of the half million membership, their numbers are increasing rapidly – up 88 per cent since 2005. Last year, for the first time ever, more girls than boys joined the Scouts.

This prompted some people to draw unfavourable comparisons with the single-sex Girl Guides, despite the fact that they still just outnumber the Scouts. Today’s volunteers, however, dismiss suggestions of rivalry: many of them work with both organisations.

“They have the same founding principles, only slightly different styles,” says O’Hagan. “Guides can be just as adventurous – rock climbing and canoeing. However, some activities wouldn’t appeal to all girls or boys. My group, for example, love to do craft activities – but they still enjoy rifle shooting.”

An amateur psychologist might suggest that the Duchess of Cambridge, who is supposed to have had a rotten time at her single-sex boarding school before blossoming at co-ed Marlborough College, will be happier in mixed company. There might, of course, be a more prosaic reason, such as which organisation has the best set-up in the area. In any case, O’Hagan thinks, “It’s great that the Duchess can show that the Scouts are for girls too”.

One hopes she obeys one of Baden Powell’s many maxims and “gets a good laugh on”. And if the mischievous Scouts do don balaclavas and kidnap her, at least she’ll have an excellent search-and-rescue pilot on speed dial.